by Tanith Lee
They had been speaking, out on the cold white slopes of Dorthar, about homelands—Moiyah, on the edge of the Inner Sea, blue-walled Vardath over the ocean. They remembered they were human men, for all she had changed them. But she had brought a great stillness into their lives. And even though they had spoken in words of home, those words were uttered only within their echoing brains.
They were familiar with strangeness.
So, as they reached the outskirt of their camp and saw the smoke rising, they did not balk at the other sight, that of a phantom walking before them through the snow.
One she has summoned, the Moiyan thought aloud.
Or one seeking her, Haut answered.
The vague dusk shone through the man, and his hair was like frost. Because of that, they knew him.
Raldnor’s spirit?
His son.
They proceeded, a respectful distance in his wake. He was a King. But they did look for the tremulous cord that must anchor the psyche to the body during life, and believed they detected it.
• • •
Raldanash, in his psychic condition, did not wonder, although never in the past had he ranged so distantly from the body. Nor had he ever been strong enough to project his own image in tandem with his awareness. That power would come from her, her magnetic power, like amber.
He sensed the men behind him, and their ability to accept. But they were as ghostly to him as he must be to them. The world itself was ghostly. Only the golden flame burned before him, the flame that was the girl.
He had already learned, without tuition, all she was, or all that he could understand she was. The soul of Raldnor’s daughter in an envelope of flesh, older than the flesh, reforming the flesh so that it had hastened, growing to the likeness of a young woman, perhaps eighteen years of age. Her consciousness was older. Older even than itself, for she had in some way remembered those insights that the soul forgot beyond the spiritual places of its freedom. That she was also his sister he barely noticed. Of all the reasons to approach, it was the least.
Raldanash’s physical soul entered the shell of the tower. He glimpsed fires, men and women and animals. A few—Lowlanders—glimpsed him, and fell quiet. It seemed she must have wished for them to see him, it was no ostentation. So he passed through them gently, and going approximately to the twist of the stair, ascended.
The small piece of a chamber that remained at the head of the tower, open all round to the darkening sky, was softly brilliant with her light.
Ashni. She rose to greet him, and with an odd sweetness of gesture put her hands in his. He felt her touch, though he could feel nothing else that was real, save the silver cold and the flowing water of the wind.
Her beauty was not like his own, not like the beauty of Raldnor and Sulvian and Astaris. It was the beauty of fantasy, more than pearl skin and topaz hair. Her eyes were not eyes at all, but sheer windows that showed the lamp beyond. Her strength—Raldanash had read a strength like this in Rarmon, but there it was banked; events rather than will must unfetter it. The strength of Raldanash was dissimilar. Rarmon was a sword, and Ashni a sword of fire. But he . . . he saw it now. His strength was the mirror of bronze or glass, taking the sun’s reflection, multiplying heat and flame. He saw, and he saw the mirror blaze, and buckle, cracking, shattering. This, then, was the mirror’s fate. He would die.
Her touch gave him comfort. It was not that she was pitiless. She had told him only what he had guessed, long long ago, on the plains of Vathcri, the hills of Dorthar. Like a candle, some are given life to die, the proverb said.
For some reason he thought then of Jarred, his mother’s brother, consumed in the burning sea.
Ashni held him, and the terror ebbed. She began to talk to him, not in words, or even images, but in a manner that filled his vision, hearing and heart. And it was also true that in some way she revealed the past, so he beheld Raldnor and Ashne’e, Koramvis in her glory, and other subjects of a time before time, at which he marveled, and which afterward he mislaid.
In the end, he knew death as a little thing, and in the end also, raising his eyes which were the astral eyes of his physical soul, he was not amazed or discomposed to find Ashni as she really was, a summer being limned by gold, taller than heaven where the stars were branching in her hair, her eyes like suns, her plated tail coiled with a wonderful economy, the tower miles below them both: Ashnesea, Ashkar, Anackire.
But he employed words then, finding himself in conversation with the goddess. The first word was only: “Why?”
The answer blossomed in his soul’s mind. It said:
I am the symbol and the name. In Ommos I am Zarok. In Zakoris I am Zarduk and Rorn. Outside the world, I am all others. In sleep, the dream. Beyond death, the emblem of awakening.
“And what is that awakening?” he asked Her, though he had been shown already.
She answered: Yourself.
And in the Zor, Safca dreamed of a pillar of light which did not burn.
But in the Lowland city Lur Raldnor dreamed of a black monster and a red, and Rem in the midst of fire, and his face was a screaming skull.
21.
SIX MILES FROM YLMESHD the land rose into the southeast, a climbing hip of ground woven higher yet by the reeking, fuming jungle, blood-splashed with raucous birds and lizard-eating flowers. Here, even in the cold months it was never cold. And here, too, began that Southern Road which King Yl desired should one day, loaded with men and chariots, break through to Dorthar and Vardian Zakoris.
But it was a sort of fable. The road was made and the jungle reclaimed it. It was not likely it would see completion before the battle had been joined on other, more accessible, fronts. It served to scare the Dortharians and Vardians. It served to punish those who had displeased Free Zakoris.
Somewhere in the morass of the first twenty miles of Road, slave gangs were clearing the undergrowth.
There was stone paving here, which had been laid a pair of years before. Already it was split with seedlings. The slaves, naked save for leather loin-aprons, hacked and slashed, their salts pouring from them in the heat, and now and then scarlet threads, at the whips of the overseers. A fallen slave was kicked. When she failed to get up, she was slung into a ditch at the roadside. It was forbidden that the guards enjoy her, for she was dying and to waste procreative seed was unlawful. They did not bother to cut her throat; time would see to things.
Farther on, where the great ferns and vines had been torn up, human ants labored to replace cracked stones.
Farther on again, a tree had rooted in the road. It was roped, and the ropes extended through iron harness across the backs of two huge beasts, palutorvuses, giants from the steamy swamps of Zakoris, and the margins of Thaddra. One was rust-red, the other blacker than night. They hauled blindly, streaming hair like water, flinching from the flails and goads as at the stings of insects. Behind them the mighty tree creaked. A root sprang from the stones.
A little way up, in the feverish shade just off the road, other antics were in progress. A holy man, itinerant and perhaps insane, rocked in his delirium. He had divined the possibility of rain and was now courting it. The guard did not make fun of him. When they wished for it, they had another lunatic to mock.
The cart was out on the road, wedged by the boulders against its wheels. The sun slammed down on it, disguising nothing.
He had been howling earlier, but now seemed asleep. The head had fallen forward, matted with black hair and beard. The copper skin was welted and streaked by sweat and filth. The cart was filthy, too, despite the withered garlands still decorating it, and there were chips and scratches where the shards the crowd flung at him in Ylmeshd had missed their mark. The enormous weighted chains roped him round and round, binding him to the cibba post bolted into the cart. Pinned over his head was a piece of wood with letters branded into it. Not everyone could read them, but most could guess
. I am Prince Rarmon Am Dorthar, Son of Raldnor Son of Rehdon. Behold my glory.
They had been beholding it nearly a month. Hearing it, too. He had a good couple of lungs. The words were gibberish. It was more entertaining when he thrashed in his bonds, unable to get loose. The smell of wounds and rage enthralled the Free Zakorians. This was what they would do to Dorthar as a whole, and to the yellow men who had shamed them.
Sometimes they fed him, and he was given water every day. Yl wanted Raurm Am Ralnar to live a long while.
At night when he railed at the moon, they had ceased taking the whip to him. He did not quiet. The only man who went near to try knocking him insensible—the madman had gone for his throat and bitten through the neck vein. The guard expired in minutes, hiccupping blood. Now, when Rarmon bawled they cursed him, but nothing else.
Fifty yards away, the tree tore from the road in a fountain of soil and stones. The palutorvuses stamped, and the prisoner in the cart lifted his head.
His eyes were yellow, like the eyes of the Lowland witch Ashne’e, his grandmother.
The Free Zakorians would have put out his eyes, but Yl—Kathus—had decreed he should not be maimed. It was said he would be paraded in the war, and must be recognizable to the foe.
The undergrowth along the sides of the road was to be burned off. Much farther south, in the choked valleys between the mountains that squatted by Old Zakoris, stretches of forest were often set on fire for clearing. An outpost of the Road was well-advanced there, mostly in order to alarm the Storm Lord’s spies. Between that area and this, the rampage of the jungles had been scarcely breached.
Rain was frequent at this season, and they coincided their fires. The deeps of the forests were never dry, full of exhalation and sap, but here in the opened places the trees would flare like kindling, needing some check.
The madman in the cart, if he had even noticed, had presided over two such ignitings and quenchings. The air first perilous with flame and flaming splinters, next the thunder, deluge, and dense strangling smoke. Thirteen days back, a bevy of slaves had been trapped among the thickets and burned, the storm too late to save them. If their screams evoked any ironic memory in the madman’s tumbling thoughts, he did not demonstrate. He stood silent in his chains, then and now.
They could not hope the swamp-giants would be so peaceful. Every palutorvus loathed fire. As the sky about the trees began to threaten, men had climbed up and hooded the beasts, smearing their hairy trunks with salve to veil for them the stink of burning. Now they were being fed titbits. The half-starved slaves were too resigned to look on with envy. Gangs of Alisaarians, Iscaians and Thaddrians worked this plot. There had been a gang of mixes, too, but they were dead. Men with the fair blood generally did not last long at this enterprise under this western sun.
The holy man who divined rain came to, and stood up, snuffling thirstily. He held out his hand displaying three fingers. “This much time, no more.”
The sky was swollen, seeming to touch the treetops. The Zakorians received their order and pounded along the slave lines. Men and women ran forward, touching bright tongues of light against the forest. Suddenly, like a wave, an invisible curling, soaring thing dashed up thirty feet into the branches. Charcoal fell. The slaves skipped away and bunched together on the middle of the track.
Birds hurled shrieking into the sky.
A white cicatrice of lightning slit the clouds. Timing, it would seem, had been commendable.
Thunder rang. The swamp-beasts shook their hooded heads. They were dumb and could not vocalize distress. They had, despite prevention, scented fire.
Walls of transparent flame reared either side of the road. The slaves huddled, offering prayers, groaning, while the holy man pranced, lifting his thin paws to heaven. The overseers began to swear in fear. For the rain did not come.
Thunder sounded again, directly overhead. Two lightning bolts crossed the sky and seemed to meet, exploding—somewhere in the forest a tree jetted into new fire. A blazing stem sprawled across the road. The slaves screamed and milled. The guards roared for the water barrels to be released, and struck out with their lashes, to little avail. A flash of water became steam as the fire drank it in.
Fire was everywhere. Even the sky was full of it—raining fire not liquid.
Retreating from the holocaust, a Free Zakorian stumbled against the madman’s cart. Looking up, he saw the dark golden eyes reflecting lightning. The Zakorian backed away. He remembered which line this man inherited, the very legend over his head proclaimed it—a Storm Lord.
Just then, between the terror of fire-forest and electric sky, a final night-black terror tore loose on the Southern Road.
Someone had been careless at the tethering. Now, savage with its panic, blind in the hood but smelling only conflagration, hearing only the gongs of heaven, the younger palutorvus had broken from its traces. Men scattered away. One not sufficiently swift was tossed, pulped like ripe fruit, as the mighty feet trampled over him.
Scorched, sightless, stupid with fear, the palutorvus bore on. Lightning stabbed into the forest. A white instant showed the giant beast, seeming massive as a mountain. Slaves jumped desperately aside, into fire, which for a moment seemed preferable. The only motionless impediment was the wedged cart and the man shackled within it.
The stampeding palutorvus hit the cart it could not see. The wooden sides burst apart, the wheels whirled across the stones. The cibbawood post bolted to the floor of the cart snapped away, catching as it fell between the monster’s limbs. It seemed Raurm Am Ralnar, bound to that post, would be trampled like the Zakorian. Something else happened. The chains, producing slack as the post was ripped out, had become tangled in the animal’s matted under-hair and the trails of rope which were the remnants of its tethers.
Unable to rid itself of this senseless thing, hung at its belly like weird young, the palutorvus veered desperately sideways, plunging abruptly off the road. The last of the cart disintegrated before it. Directionless and crazed, the beast drove against the very wall of the inferno, and parted it. Into the burning jungle, itself burning, the giant lurched, the post and the chained man dragged with it, and was gone.
• • •
When the rain began it sank in a heavy curtain. The madman lay beneath it, and let his body drink.
The animal which had carried him had rushed for many miles, a great voiceless engine. The mobile tent of its body had shielded him from the fire, the forest. And the jungle had given way before the animal, as the fire had ultimately given way. In the thick moisture-mist of the jungle’s gut, the incendiary lights had died from its back. Somewhere it had sloughed its burden, or the claws of the jungle had torn the burden away.
He had been stunned through much of the flight, by repeated blows, smoke, speed. Only now, under the downpour, did he recall he was alive. Then he turned on his side, for the rains of the north and west could drown a man on his back. He thought, too, to open his mouth and let it drink with his flesh and his bones.
The madman was yet a madman. For him, there was neither past nor present, and no future. His brain was all mosaic. Here an icon which was a girl, hair like rubies, here something like a black wall, and the sea beyond. Or there a merchant who was begging to be spared the blade’s edge. Or a silver coin, spinning. It did not irk him. None of it had a name, a start, an end, a purpose. None of it demanded anything of him.
But now, although he did not begin to reason, yet there was some sort of curious change. What was it?
The madman came to his feet and looked about through the shadowy forest, washed by rain as if by ocean.
When the rain stopped, he was walking. It did not concern him where. Sometimes he touched the trees, interested by them. Sometimes he touched his own face. His hands had been wrapped in chains, which were gone, all but some bits of metal still adhering, clanking about him, not constraining him at all. The madman did no
t theorize upon this. How the post, uprooted, discarded, had uncoiled the chains, and he, rolling from under the great beast, had uncoiled them further. The securing links had given way when the bolts in the cart did so. He had only needed eventually to crawl out of them, as out of the creeper under the trees.
He had forgotten the Zakorians also.
The bluish storm sun went down behind his left shoulder, but he did not note it. Black monkeys with faces like white butterflies watched from the terraces of the boughs sixty feet up. He saw a mask, half black, half white. He saw a man with black hair, and a black pearl.
There came to be a particular shadow, very tall and dense. While he did not recollect it, he sensed acquaintance.
The palutorvus shambled between the trees which, at some juncture, had relieved it of the blinding hood. Too long a captive of men, it grazed the sap-laden leaves, sighing, lost.
When the smaller creature advanced, the palutorvus turned to it, expecting guidance, the goad or the sweetmeat: Order. It had been trained to bear men, even on its back, and despite the smart of its blisters, it soon kneeled. The man did not mount it for some time, staying beside it, touching it. But then the man did go up on to the great back, catching at vines to aid himself.
The palutorvus rose with a feeling of calm, appeased.
Some conceivably involuntary pressure was interpreted as a command.
Riding the primeval beast, the madman slept, dreaming still the mosaic, and the moon filled the forest.
• • •
Days and nights were swilled from the world.
The beast moved onward, sometimes pausing to graze the foliage. The madman, too, grazed on the leaves and grasses. Some were fragrant, others musty, or bitter, and these he spat out.
He saw a blue enameled snake embracing an indigo tree.
He saw the sun, and believed it had wings and was a child. Or the moon, and it had a boy’s face and closed eyes.